Finishing up the year

Everyone wound up catching the stomach bug Milo had last week, so instead of finishing up the year in a blaze of productive glory as planned, we're kind of taking it easy this week.  Ari should finish Singapore 4a, though, and Milo should finish Explode the Code 3.  And I'm trying to finish up our current read-alouds in history, so we don't stop halfway through those for two weeks.  

We're also doing some fun stuff that we don't usually do, like tea time. Tea time is an idea from the Bravewriter website; I've written about it before, because we used to do it with some regularity.  Basically, you make your table all pretty, have some tea, and read.  Periodically, the kids ask when we're going to do tea time again.  And the truth is, tea time is easy and good for us and everyone likes it, so why haven't we been doing it?  I don't know.  But we did it on Monday, and we'll try to keep it up. 

We used to always do hot chocolate, but this time both Ari and Milo wanted actual tea and even drank some of it (after putting a good bit of sugar in it).  We pulled down the sugar dish, even!  And place mats!

I have a fair-sized collection of poetry anthologies for kids that I've picked up here and there, so I pulled out a few, and Ari picked Where the Sidewalk Ends, and we started to read.  I think I actually did a pretty good job of talking about the poems on the fly.  We just learned about similes and metaphors in book club awhile back, so we found lots of those. Think what we could accomplish if I actually read the poems in advance!  We talked about how one of my professors in college told us you should read a poem 100 times (and then we talked about what hyperbole is) and how every word is important in a poem.  We read Ted Hughes' "Roger the Dog," which I'd never read before and found charming.  Anyway, it was good stuff.  Being comfortable with poetry is one of those homeschooling goals for the kids I always have in the back of my head.  I had a really fabulous English teacher my last three years of high school (same teacher all three years), and I felt very prepared for college lit classes; even in grad school, I always felt like I was more comfortable with and had a better background in poetry than a lot of the other students...it's so neglected in high school classes, even generally good ones.  And then people avoid it in college.  Also, I just like poetry, and the kids (Ari in particular) seem to as well.

 

 

There is much blathering to do about future plans--both for next year and for the rest of this year.  But I'll save that for later.  Did you know that Roger the Dog is so lazy that "he only wakes to scratch his fleas?"  It's true.  In high school, I always disliked Ted Hughes because my friend Angie was very into Sylvia Plath, and she told me he was a jerk.